The present device is directed generally to providing an interface between a point-of-sale system and a cash drawer, and more specifically to providing an interface between a point-of-sale system requiring a cash drawer with a serial port and a CDKO-style cash drawer having no serial port.
Cash drawers and point-of-sale (POS) systems associated with them are well-known in the art. In the past, POS software has required that a cash drawer include a serial port in order to receive the appropriate command to open the cash drawer. Such systems generally operate by sending any character to the cash drawer, often in repetition, in order to open the cash drawer. Such systems suffer from inefficiency due to the sending of multiples characters to the cash drawer, and are also limited in that more than one cash drawer cannot be readily controlled by the same POS software system because any cash drawer on the system will respond to any character sent by the system by opening the drawer. Further, cash drawers with serial ports tend to be relatively expensive.
Newer, less expensive cash drawers rely on modern hardware rather than serial ports. Such cash drawers are typically termed cash drawer kick out (CDKO) type cash drawers. Such cash drawers have a number of advantages over older cash drawers, and are desired in the marketplace. Such cash drawers are not, however, compatible with POS software requiring a cash drawer with a serial port. In other words, older POS software is not generally compatible with much of the new POS hardware. Because POS software may represent a business investment of tens of thousands of dollars, it is often not cost-effective for a business to replace its POS software to keep up with hardware changes.
The present invention provides an interface between a POS system requiring a cash drawer with a serial port, and a cash drawer having non-serial port hardware (such as a CDKO cash drawer).